Infidelities

by Josip Novakovich

  What if there are children there, you’d like to kill them?

  I’d like to destroy the building. It’s Saturday, nobody is there now.

  How do you know? Maybe the cleaning women are washing the stairway or something…

  I doubt it. The stairway hasn’t been cleaned in ages; they just don’t do that.

  Do you want to wait for Monday? That could work better—you could get them all!

  No. Let’s just smash that ugly school right away.

  Maybe you’ll have your way. The captain has selected a few targets, the metal factory, the railway station, and yes, the school. The school, he thinks, could already be full of soldiers because of the thick walls. We can aim for the windows, blast inside.

  The artillery man called his assistant over, to adjust the projectiles. The captain came by, and nodded. Yes, that’s a good idea. We’ve waited long enough. Go ahead!

  Now, my boy, the artillery man said, I’ve already taught you how to aim the scope—so do it.

  Mirko adjusted the scope to the tall black window in the middle of the yellow building, on the second floor. As soon as he saw the window, he recalled all the humiliation he’d endured: the math teacher, the boys who attacked him, the girl who played love games, which were actually, he was sure, hate games. Now he would show her, him, them. They would never gather in that room again, he’d make sure of that. The stove, the blackboard, everything must go. The creeps can gather for school in the basements, below taverns, and enjoy the restroom smells.

  The artillery man right next to him breathed heavily, and coughed; his breath smelled of garlic, so Mirko breathed shallow, at least tried to, but couldn’t because his heart pounded and he panted from the excitement, desire and trepidation. He trembled, and did not know whether from fear or the cold. His teeth chattered, the ear buzzed, the tuning fork resurrected itself in his ear and chimed a high C, which darkened the yellow valley.

  Here, have the earphones, said the man to Mirko.

  No, I’d like to enjoy the full blast.

  Your eardrums would rupture. Put it on, be a good boy. Do you want music piped in? You could watch your school blow up with your favorite piece of music in the background. What’s your favorite music? Maybe we got it? We got Jimi Hendrix, “Machine Gun.” I loved that stuff when I was your age.

  Explosions, that’s my favorite music.

  Okay, you got it. You know, we’ve all been waiting for this moment, and it’s just a lucky synchronicity.

  What’s synchronicity?

  You’ll find out in due time.

  A few seconds later, a powerful blast shook Mirko. The cannon recoiled, emitted fire and smoke, and ten seconds later, there was another blast, a smaller one, at the school. The sound from there came shortly afterward, as a small echo.

  Again! he shouted. And that was the loveliest morning he had ever spent. His bones had been shaken, even his teeth, in such a way that his bones felt happy, hale, for a moment at least, until a dread descended onto him. He tasted the dread as smoke and diesel in the back of his nose, thickly descending into his throat and stinging. He looked down into the valley, into the smoke, which grew higher and wider. What if a class had gathered for an extracurricular activity, such as acting or dancing or singing? Did Bojana go to those clubs? What if he had just turned her beautiful red lips into blood? He no longer hated her, no longer wanted revenge. What if he’d just become a mass murderer? Could he go back and live in the town again? Could he walk in the town as though nothing had happened, and worry about decimal point divisions, the quality of snow, and the shine on his skis? Would he walk around wrapped up in a cloud of gun smoke which would never leave him?

  No, he would not go back to study at school torture chambers to become a scientist or an engineer in many years. He could become a soldier right away, going from mountain top to mountain top, blasting away. He had found the best job in the world for a boy.

  Tchaikovsky’s Bust

  When I suggested traveling to Russia by myself, my family was in an uproar.

  We are all going, said my wife, Joan.

  Russia is just not safe for kids, I objected. There’s too much pollution. One guidebook suggests taking along a Geiger counter to see how often it goes off while you walk around St. Petersburg. Kids can get food poisoning, the hospitals aren’t safe—they reuse needles. And the hotel has lead paint half an inch thick cracking on all the windows.

  Oh, don’t give me that. We’ve been there two times, and we just loved walking everywhere—the palaces, the canals, museums, festivals, White Nights—and the kids got so much stimulation that they visibly grew. And if it’s so bad, why would you go?

  Well, professionally, it’s important. I’ll meet a lot of writers and artists and get new ideas.

  No way, said Joan. You aren’t going. I know how Russian women behave. After your trip alone you used to get bunches of postcards in Cyrillic. Who knows what they said.

  Oh, that was ten years ago. All they wanted was exit visas.

  And they were willing to do pretty much anything to get them?

  I don’t know. I didn’t test them.

  No, Daddy cannot go, said my son, Alex. He can’t walk straight when he drinks, and there’s way too much traffic in St. Petersburg.

  That’s right, Joan laughed. Too much traffic. I still remember your talking to that slut in German.

  I remember hardly a thing.

  Case in point.

  The mistrust was my fault, no doubt about it. First time we were there, on our first day in St. Petersburg, Boris, our host, could not find a restaurant although he claimed he knew the city like the back of his palm, and we sat at an outdoor bar, near the Bronze Horseman monument. I drank three drafts of local beer, Baltika #9, and got so wasted that I was sure the beer was fortified with grain alcohol. On an empty stomach with jetlag, dizzy from the drink, I fell into a conversation in German with a woman who sat at a table next to ours in such a way that I couldn’t recall when and how the conversation started. She was with a boyfriend, but she ignored him…after a while, everybody, including Boris, wanted the woman and me to quit talking, but we wouldn’t. Hey, man, this is not decent.

  I imagine so, I said, but it’s nice to speak German. It’s been years.

  But you are in Russia.

  Believe it or not, I am aware of that.

  From the beer, I had to make a few runs to the bushes nearby, and Joan, who’d also had a few and laughed with her neighbors at the other table, sought an indoor restroom. And so it happened that Joan’s purse was cleaned of all the money in it, some eighty dollars.

  Now I told Joan, The woman or her boyfriend emptied your handbag, and stole your money. I think she talked with me for the money.

  And what were you talking to her for?

  Sheer drunken unconsciousness.

  There was more to it than that, but the drunken part, too, is worrisome.

  I agree. I’ll work at it.

  The evening had been enjoyable nevertheless. While we walked back to the hotel, I staggered next to the walls and bounced off them on Nevsky. Even though it was White Nights, at two in the morning it got dark. White Nights, as far as I was concerned, were a tourist fraud, like nearly everything in St. Petersburg. Alex was pushing me along, laughing and calling me a stupid drunk.

  And so I now lost the argument. I would take my family along, and be a good dad, and drink hardly at all. And I was a good dad as soon as we got there. I took Alex to several concerts and museums, and I spent my time teaching at Herzen, mostly nonfiction writing. I did not manage to do as much for our daughter, Tina, as I had for Alex, primarily because she was too little to go to concerts and not disrupt them. But she wept to go to a ballet and could not be stopped.

  Tina had always danced. Before she could stand, she would hold onto the kitchen table and bob to the rhythm of music on the radio. When she learned to walk, pretty soon she grew to prefer walking on tiptoe. Her heels rarely touched the floor. I don’t kno
w where she picked up that style of walking—whether she had seen a tape with ballet dancers, or whether she had stepped on bits of gravel and other prickly debris that now and then found their way to our floor.

  I wanted to buy tickets to Swan Lake, but the ticket salesman told us that Tina was too little to be trusted to stay quiet for three hours. I could understand that. Tina could throw a temper tantrum in public shamelessly, extremely loudly. So my wife and I explained to Tina that unfortunately we could not see Swan Lake with her. She would probably be too loud and talk too much. She said, I will not shout. I will whisper.

  Oh, no, you never know what you will say. Sometimes you swear.

  Whenever she grew angry, she used a whole array of foul curses, such as I could not decently put on the page. That wouldn’t go over big in a theater, I believe. She picked up the swear words from Alex’s older friends, not me. At least I believe that.

  No, I will not swear, and I will be quiet, she said.

  How do you know?

  I will sleep. Let me go, I will not talk and I will sleep.

  Namely, Alex had fallen asleep at one concert of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, performed immaculately by Vladimir Feltsman. And so Tina understood that one slept at concerts.

  That Tina argued her case so thoroughly made me wish all the more to take her to the ballet. But at Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev, which I saw with my son, I could not see anyone younger than six at the Mariinsky Theater. Unstoppably she danced around the apartment, hopping, kicking up, and shouting, un, deux, un, deux.

  While buying the tickets at the Bolshoi Theater several days in advance, I tried passing for a Russian, to get the Russian rather than the tourist rates, and this time it worked. All of us could go for ten dollars instead of fifty dollars apiece. That was the first time I had passed the test—and I credited my exhaustion after three weeks of being in Russia. I looked ill, and therefore I passed for a Russian. Or, the better and less likely interpretation is that the few words in Russian I had repeated over and over sounded Russian enough.

  With trepidation, we set off for the theater. My wife would go with Alex, and I would go with Tina, since we got two pairs of tickets. We started from our temporary apartment, on the Petrograd side of the Neva. We waved down a gypsy cab, with a damaged front window and wires passing above the door to the back. The man asked for only twenty rubles, about seventy-five cents, to take us. The normal price would be forty or fifty, and some cabbies asked for a hundred as soon as they sized you up as a foreigner. That’s why I made a point to speak Russian. I imagined that the Slavic accent, from Slovenia, which is pretty similar to Russian, would convince the cabbies that I was not from a prosperous country. I planned to pay him fifty. The man looked tired and sad, with deep creases on the side of his face. Soon, we got stuck on the Nevsky Bridge. The car began to overheat. It grew worse. Damned car, said the cabbie. I worried for him, and his car, and for us, that we would miss the ballet. Smoke puffed out in the front. I did not have to tell him to stop. We got out. I paid him the twenty. He said, I am sorry. I said, I am sorry too. There he sat in the middle of the bridge, in a cloud of his steam, which was surrounded by blue smoke from many cars. The stench from burning rubber of many overheating old cars, the leady smoke, the oil oozing from old military trucks with huge tires that were now used by civilians, turned our stomachs. Yui, yui, yucky smoke tastes yucky, said Tina. We walked across the bridge and looked for the cause of the stalled traffic. The crossroad’s traffic moved slowly, but perseveringly, despite the red light. It seemed the traffic from one street would not let the traffic from the other proceed, and at a point the two nearly collided, but one street kept up the pressure and the courage and prevailed over the other in a strange duel of streets. We waved down another cab. Sorok rublei. We still had enough time to get a bite to eat. Near the Fontanka River, we went into a small café underground, and placed the order for our food, bliny and palmini. We ate quickly and rushed off to the theater. Tina rode on my shoulders. Faster, horsie, she said. She was dressed in a red dress. People smiled at her. You hardly ever see children riding their parents in St. Petersburg. You hardly ever see men with children, for that matter. Marina, a guide hired by the conference group, complimented me on carrying my daughter everywhere. That’s how I used to sit, on my dad’s shoulders, she said. Men these days don’t marry, and if they do, they don’t want to have children, and if they have children, they get depressed and run away and drink themselves to death—that’s current Russian family life. I was happy and proud, a good compensation for the literal pain in the neck that Tina gave me.

  We made it to the Bolshoi, ten minutes before the performance, and the ticket controller let Tina and me breeze through. A sign said: No Picture Taking During the Performance. An announcement was made over the loudspeakers to the same effect, but there were so many tourists with cameras hanging from their necks, in some cases like a third breast, that the warning was bound to be defeated.

  Tina and I went to a box on the side. She said, Daddy, where are they?

  Who?

  The ballerinas.

  Behind that crimson curtain.

  What are they doing?

  Putting on their pink shoes.

  She shone with anticipation. I looked at her proudly and hugged her.

  Daddy, you are covering my view.

  The curtains shook as though they would just part. From our side angle, we had to crane our necks to see the full stage, and sometimes, it seemed we’d have to swan our necks. Poor pun for Swan Lake, but it did feel like it, although if I didn’t stretch my neck, the obstacle to the stage was intriguing enough. We shared the box with a girl, who wore a white silk shirt, a black cashmere sweater over it, and pearls which glimmered in the dark, reflecting the light in a purple and turquoise haze. Her hair was shiny black, falling away to the other side of her face, so her ear and white skin were exposed to me in profile, and sometimes the hair fell to our side like a little waterfall. Before the performance, she leaned her head on her left arm, over the velvet box parapet, and wrote a letter in blue, in slanted boxy Russian letters, yet with a flow of her wrist and fingers. The button on her silk shirt above her wrist occasionally sparkled pink and crimson, no doubt borrowing the deep burgundy of the velvet surrounding us, appropriating it, and disseminating it generously in its own version. Letter writing. Who writes letters anymore? This seemed such a nostalgic view, just as the ballet was, the whole impression came from a bygone era, yet it was here, vividly absorbing me so much that I no longer craned my neck with the worry that I wouldn’t see the stage.

  I caught myself looking and was embarrassed. Wait a minute, what are you doing? Look at the stage.

  I looked at Tina. Pure heaven in her eyes. The innocent delight on her flushed cheeks, the glow. And she was quiet. She whispered something to me so softly I couldn’t hear it. It was just warm breath in my ear. More than words could tell. I was happy, she was happy. I sat back a little, and there was again my neighbor’s neck.

  No matter how old the girl was, clearly she was enchanting. Was she aware of it? How couldn’t she be? Her movements, her letter writing, it was all done with such flare that it looked like a performance, but then, why would it be? Did she address the present moment, saying she was anticipating the ballet, while next to her sat a middle-aged foreigner with his little daughter, who was all sparkly in her silk red? And indeed, the girl occasionally stole glances at Tina, and a smile lingered on her face. I was tempted to ask her, in Russian, what she was writing about, but the silence felt subtler than a conversation, and more communicative. She was aware of us, but naturally, my daughter was more impressive than I. Would Tina turn out to be like this in a dozen years, sitting by herself in a theater? Why? Shouldn’t a girl like this be shopping, or getting drunk under a bridge with her peers? Under a pier? Didn’t this seem to be a waste of youth and beauty, watching reruns of Swan Lake? And reruns seemed to be the right word because during the first intermission, Tina said to
me, Daddy, this is the best movie I ever seen.

  It’s not a movie, I said. They are really out there. You could throw a stone at them and it would hurt them, they might scream. They are here.

  Oh, she said. There are no stones here.

  I mean those people out there on the stage are real. They are not just pretend people.

  You mean, they are not just pretend swans. They are real swans? They look like people to me, Daddy.

  You win.

  The lights came on for the break and I wanted to find Alex and Joan. I was tempted to invite our neighbor along, but she seemed content to pull out her paper and continue writing. What news is there to report?

  Russian theater intermissions are unpredictably long. This one went on for more than half an hour. People drank cognac, ate red caviar sandwiches with an amazing amount of butter to go with that, strolled. Some women had fur, although it was warm, but looks are everything, temperature is nothing. There were many young people, unlike what I remembered from such events in the States. And why not? With two, three intermission parties like this, it seemed a fine way to spend an evening. You sat down at a round table, and soon you could be chatting with a stranger. At a different performance, Alex and I met a family from Pakistan who invited us to visit them and go to the foothills of K-2, the second-tallest mountain in the world which for two weeks enjoyed the reputation as being the tallest. It was amazing that classical culture could go along with this leisurely atmosphere in which it was permitted to talk with everybody. Russians knew how to keep up the traditions. I never understood why Russian theater, ballet, and classical music could thrive, but now it seemed, in a flash, clear to me. The intermission! The cognac. The parade. Especially, in the winter, when you can’t stroll outdoors, you could come inside and do it. Along the Adriatic Coast, the tradition, as anywhere else along the Mediterranean, has been to go out into the streets, and to walk back and forth in the evening.

  But here, things had to happen in public indoor spaces. This was their version of a Mediterranean, and indeed, suddenly, even their temperaments seemed hotter. I had a shot of cognac. Tina and I found Alex and Joan, and the kids chased each other around, after having had a couple of salami sandwiches each. This is fun, Joan said, I love it.